Fabricated tale of gang life reaffirms the need to question “memoirs” that don’t make sense

For more than a year, this site has been raising questions about Ishmael Beah’s purported memoir of two years as a child solider, A Long Way Gone, that have received unsatisfactory responses from the author and his publisher. Why do critics, journalists and you, the reader, need to keep challenging aspects of personal accounts that don’t make sense?

One answer is implicit in a story in today’s New York Times about a young writer’s confession that she made up Love and Consequences, a widely praised book billed as a “memoir” of her life as a drug-runner for the Bloods: Publishers are doing too little to verify the authenticity of their books www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/books/04fake.html. Book publishers have never done – nor can they be expected to do – the exhaustive fact-checking that occurs at The New Yorker. But the Times‘s story shows that they sometimes don’t take the much more basic steps that would be reasonable.

Love and Consequences was reportedly exposed as a fraud by a call to the publisher, Riverhead Books, from a sister of the author, Margaret Seltzer, who used the pen name of Margaret B. Jones. Riverhead is a unit of the Penguin Group USA, one of the world’s largest publishers. It seems that all an editor would have to do to uncover problems with this book would have been to require the writer to provide the telephone numbers of a few immediate-family members, then call those people.

[The Penguin Group has recalled all copies of Love and Consequences, and One-Minute Book Reviews will comment on the recall in a post later today.]

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I’m thinking that the publishers LOVE the $$$ and no longer care about the CONSEQUENCES of disseminating fraudulent information. In our current society, one could say there’s too much of the former and not enough of the latter.

Hi Janice –
I heard this story first thing this morning and have heard it all day now.

Last week this author was promoting her book on a Boston NPR program called ‘On Point’.

I think it’s unfortunate that lies like this gets by the publishers and agents, who put so much time, effort and investment into the writing and story. It seems that at some point the story line loses its primary role to other considerations.

And people ask ‘Why are you so cynical?’

Well, James Frey, Jayson Blair and now Margret XX. (I think there is another memoir that has been exposed as a fraud that I’ve left out…)

P: Your mention of agents is very pertinent. One reason why scandals may be getting more common is that editors are relying more and more on agents to serve as gatekeepers or to do some of the work editors might have done in the past. No matter how good an agent is, a book will always need an editor, too.
Jan

Not disingenous at all. But the financial and other implications of calling a book “fiction” or “nonfiction” can be great. One is that, in general, if you write nonfiction you have many more opportunities to publicize your book. You don’t have to depend on reviews but can be interviewed as an expert on your subject, for example.

One of the first things a novice writer hears about when considering writing articles and nonfiction books is credentials. Such scandals as this one tend to make beginners think they can just wing it, fake it, make it up, or take bits and pieces of other people’s stories and compose a new life for oneself.

Now, perhaps running drugs isn’t the kind of resume material that can be checked as easily as a prospective author’s other claims. Yet…

I wonder if it is, in cases such as this one in particular, that they are taken with the opportunity to become an instant celebrity; and that this desire eclipses whatever they might have learned from the mistakes of others.

They might well be infatuated with the idea of celebrity. But Seltzer and others seem not to have anticipated the degree of scrutiny of your life that comes with celebrity. That’s the catch, always, with fame: You can’t have the glory without reporters vetting your life story for inconsistencies.

Yes, I do think the scandals do encourage people to wing it because many will, I suspect, assume that the scandals are only the tip of the iceberg of fake stuff being published. As the discussion unfolds, it gets worse, for young writers are now hearing that nobody’s minding the store and checking the facts.

The authors who do it are playing with fire, though. Publishers’ contracts typically have a clause requiring you to indemnify them against lawsuits. If authors do get caught, they could have to pay back thousands of dollars — not just for the advance but for any related sales, such as film and foreign rights.